OpenStack Summit May 2015 Vancouver

When users interact with OpenStack components, they do so via the RESTful HTTP APIs. As such, these APIs often provide the first impression that the OpenStack project gives to the developer and user community. If we're honest, that first impression can sometimes be a bit, well, ugly. Resource naming, URI structure, documentation, discovery, and request/response payloads for our HTTP APIs are often inconsistent, sometimes too complex, and at times very unfriendly to our users.

In the past release cycle, a working group of community members from across the OpenStack projects has come together to focus on the public face of OpenStack: these HTTP APIs. In this session, we will discuss the goals of the API working group, the guidance that has been delivered in the last release cycle, as well as the pain points and ongoing debates. We show examples of current inconsistencies in our APIs, compare our APIs to other cloud management platform APIs, and demonstrate why our HTTP APIs are so important to the success of the OpenStack project.

In the course of the talk, we'll also demonstrate a new testing framework developed by Chris Dent called "Gabbi" that aims to clarify both how the OpenStack contributors *think about* APIs as well as how we validate that our APIs are consistent, user friendly, and well structured.